When Match Group released its latest earnings this week, its CEO Spencer Rascoff boasted that Hinge, one of its flagship dating apps, was “crushing it,” with growth accelerating despite reports that young users are breaking up with dating apps. Revenue was up 25% compared to the same quarter the prior year, and users had flocked to the site. Previously languishing Tinder was also showing signs of a turnaround. Match’s stock popped 12% that day.
But the day before that earnings call, a Match Group shareholder named Ned Habedus filed a lawsuit against the company’s board of directors, including Rascoff and former CEO Bernard Kim, that raises questions about the company’s leadership and the board’s priorities in the wake of a bombshell investigation published earlier this year.
That media report, “Dating App Cover-Up: How Tinder, Hinge, and Their Corporate Owner Keep Rape Under Wraps,” by the Pulitzer Center and Calmatters, co-published by The Guardian and The 19th, grew out of 18 months of reporting and is widely excerpted in the new lawsuit, which was filed in a federal court in central California.
Quoting the reporting, the lawsuit alleges that “‘Match Group has known… which users have been reported for drugging, assaulting, or raping their dates since at least 2016, according to internal company documents. Since 2019, Match Group’s central database has recorded every user reported for rape and assault across its entire suite of apps; by 2022, the system, known as Sentinel, was collecting hundreds of troubling incidents every week, company insiders say.’”
Match did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment on the new lawsuit. Nor did its former CEO Bernhard Kim. When the investigation was published, the company told the media outlets that it “vigorously combats violence,” according to the report. “We will always work to invest in and improve our systems, and search for ways to help our users stay safe, both online and when they connect in real life,” Match Group said in a statement at the time. It also said: “We take every report of misconduct seriously, and vigilantly remove and block accounts that have violated our rules regarding this behavior.”
However, Match Group has not yet produced a promised report that would give all stakeholders, including customers, a clear sense of the risks facing users. And some accused offenders found ways to stay on the site, allowing them to continue trawling the websites for potential targets—sometimes for months or years—even after their crimes had been reported to Match.
The complaint also claims, again citing the investigative report, “In one particularly outrageous example… cardiologist Stephen Matthews retained access to Match’s platforms as late as January 25, 2023, despite a user reporting him for sexual assault on September 28, 2020. Match only removed his profile after he was arrested by law enforcement.” In 2024, Matthews was convicted by a Colorado court of drugging 10 women he met through dating apps Hinge and Tinder, and sexually assaulting eight of them. He was sentenced to serve 158 years in prison.
An attorney for the plaintiff declined to comment and pointed Fortune to the complaint.
Match Group, a $8.8 billion company, owns more than a dozen apps, including Tinder, Hinge, Match, Meetic, OkCupid, and Plenty Of Fish. The lawsuit seeks damages from the executives and board members named for breaches of fiduciary duty, securities law violations, and unjust enrichment. It also calls for reforms to corporate governance and risk oversight, restitution of executive pay, and other costs incurred by the company.
It is a derivative lawsuit, in which a shareholder brings claims against leadership on behalf of the company. Any payments ordered by the court go to the company, and shareholders benefit indirectly. (Typically, directors have insurance policies that will cover such payments. If the misconduct is not covered by the policies, however, board members are obliged to cover the costs themselves.)
The Pulitzer Center report opens with a harrowing and detailed account from one of Matthews’ victims, who says that when she visited Matthews at his home, he drugged and assaulted her. She was able to escape and get into an Uber, and after the effects of the drug had worn off, she reported the incident to Match. At the time of that assault, two other women had already reported Matthews to the site, according to the report.
In several cases, the lawsuit compares what the company disclosed in securities filings and during analyst calls with what the Pulitzer Center’s report alleged that the company already knew. For example, the legal filing states that the company revealed falling monthly active user figures for Tinder in November 2024 without disclosing what the plaintiff alleges was the real reason the app was losing customers: the long-running safety issues outlined in the exposé published a few months later.
“Competition or economic considerations did not cause the rapid decline in Tinder’s MAU,” the complaint says. “It faltered because users had grown tired of meeting abusers and predators on the platform.”
“Users also were frustrated by the Company’s failure to curtail this nefarious conduct,” it continues, “which was known to the Company’s leadership.”
